The Death Trust

by David Rollins

  I wondered what Special Agent Masters was like. If her debrief was anything to go by, she was the unemotional, unimaginative type. I was struck by the feeling that no one seemed to know General Scott. But then, general officers are, as a rule, remote characters to those below them in rank—the burden of command and so on.

  The C-21’s pilot, a lieutenant colonel, told me it was time to board and my stomach did a purl and dropped a stitch. I took a sleeping pill, downing it with some water from the cooler. With luck I’d be asleep before he punched the starter button. I walked to the plane and was shown a seat. To take my mind off the impending takeoff, I read through General Abraham Scott’s record. It was impressive. There was lots to read about flying. Skyraider pilot in Vietnam—two tours. A stint in the Pentagon. Back to flying duties after converting to fast jets. Grenada followed. He then took command of a wing of F4 Phantoms. Next was a tour of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow just before the fall of communism. Scott assisted in the development of fighter tactics for the USAF’s new fighter, the F-16 Falcon. It went on like this, each step a few more rungs up the ladder. Back to the Pentagon. Brussels came afterwards—his first NATO gig. He put in some time as Deputy Chief of Staff of the Air Force, then it was off to Ramstein. The guy was being seriously groomed. I wondered whether his marriage to the VP’s daughter had anything to do with this confident rise through the ranks.

  I glanced out the small porthole window. We were still on the ground, delayed.

  Scott was fifty-five years of age, or would have been. Pretty young to be where he was. He had one child—a sergeant in the marines, deceased. I rummaged through the folder until I found the general’s photograph. He was wearing his dress blues, cap off. The left side of his jacket held so many different colored ribbons it looked like a painter’s drop sheet. The photo made Scott appear like a waxwork in Madame Tussaud’s, but then, don’t all these publicity shots? The smile on his face was forced, like it was going to evaporate an instant after the flash went off. A crease between his dark eyebrows suggested his more natural expression was a frown. He looked somewhat like Gregory Peck’s not-so-good-looking brother—the tanned skin with salt-and-pepper hair. Photos of people who’ve died violently always creep me out a little. Maybe it’s the smile. You know they’ve got nothing to smile about now.

  I returned the photo to the folder and slotted it back into my bag. Or at least I think that’s what I did because, almost immediately after, I must have fallen asleep. I dreamed about Special Agent Anna Masters for some reason. I pictured her as looking a lot like Gruyere, although not as attractive. Brenda was in there, too, I think, although how exactly I fail to recall. As the aircraft slipped into its descent, the change in motion, engine pitch, and so on jolted me awake. I was gripping the seat with my fingernails digging into the upholstery. I’m well aware this seems like odd behavior for an air force officer.

  We taxied to a refueling point on the ground at some Royal Air Force base in England, and deplaned while the C-21 was juiced for the final leg. It turned into a four-hour layover while the pilots waited for another passenger, an RAF squadron leader returning to Ramstein. It was dark, cold, and wet, wind blowing the rain horizontal under the tarmac lights. I hoped Germany was more welcoming. I’d never been there, but my grandfather had. I remembered him saying that it was not a very friendly place, and that people had shot at him and his tank often. But that was a long time ago.

  The run to Ramstein, which is apparently situated in the heart of the Rhineland, wherever that is, took another few hours. I slept—this time dreamlessly—and woke with the copilot, a young lieutenant, giving my shoulder a shake.

  “Sir…sir, we’re here.”

  “Wha…?”

  Relieved to be alive after so long in the air, I ducked to fit through the C-21’s door and took in my new surroundings. It was early morning. The sun was up. It was cold, around forty-five degrees. The place smelled of rain and burnt JP-4 jet fuel. Even at this hour there was a lot of jet noise: planes starting up and shutting down, planes taxiing, planes taking off and landing. The vast apron was a parking lot of USAF C-130 transport planes, more than thirty in all, some painted lowvis gray, others in dark green or desert camouflage. There was a row of Polish F-16 Vipers, as well as a flight of four Vietnam War–vintage F-4 Phantoms operated by the Turkish Air Force. With the exception of these old clunkers, I could have been scoping any air force base anywhere in the world. There was nothing in the least unique about it, nothing particularly “German” about the place, and certainly there were no cheery “Welcome to Deutschland!” banners strung up anywhere. And, thankfully, there didn’t appear to be any tanks running around getting shot at or otherwise.

  Suspended in the air over the control tower were the arches of two enormous, crisply defined rainbows, glowing in the morning light. They served as the welcoming committee until a Humvee squealed to a stop nearby. The driver’s door swung open and a woman pushed herself out from behind the steering wheel. “Special Agent Cooper? Special Agent Masters,” she said over the ambient jet noise. Masters saluted and I returned it. “How was your flight?”

  “Great,” I said.

  “Great,” she replied. I had the impression I could have said, “Like sticking my head in a bucket of octopus shit” and she still would’ve said great.

  “I’ll take you to your quarters. I tried to find you accommodation on the base but couldn’t. It’s all booked solid. I thought it would be best if you were in the thick of things.” She shrugged. “You got luggage?”

  I reached back into the C-21 and pulled out my bag. It wasn’t a big bag and there wasn’t much in it.

  “I hope you’ve got thermals in there,” Masters observed. “It gets pretty cold around here.”

  So, I’d just met the woman and already she was thinking about my underwear. Once upon a time I would have grabbed that thought and run with it, but my ego had taken a pounding during the separation and divorce, and so I let it go without comment. Masters was nothing like I imagined her, at least to look at. That she wasn’t a clone of Gruyere was a relief, given we’d be spending a fair bit of time together on this investigation. She was tall, around five eleven, with chocolate-colored hair pulled back in a regulation bun. With heels, we’d be eyeball to eyeball. Hers, by the way, were unusual—a smoky green at the outer edges and a gold-flecked blue that deepened in color around the pupil. They were extraordinary eyes, the kind you see in mascara ads in women’s magazines. And no doubt Masters knew it. Being a cop, I’m pretty good at guessing, but I had no idea what her weight was because she was wearing a loose-fitting, Army Combat Uniform with a bulky green jacket over the top that was maybe a size or two too big. She had good cheekbones, and a few small freckles scattered across the bridge of her small nose. The freckles together with her accent pegged her as Californian. She had an attractive face, except that it was completely devoid of pleasure or happiness. At least, to be seeing me. And if I was imagining the bored hostility aimed right at me, then maybe, in words Brenda might have used, I really did need to do something about reempowering my self-esteem.

  “Lieutenant General Wolfgang von Koeppen is a neat freak. You might like to take a shower and use a razor before you meet with him,” she said bluntly.

  “Yeah, thanks.” While I didn’t know Masters, I’d seen the disapproval on her face plenty of times before. It was the “you look like shit” expression. I tried not to let it affect our relationship right off the bat.

  “Your meeting has been rescheduled for oh-nine-fifteen. Once I take you to your quarters, you’ll have half an hour to freshen up. The general is anxious to meet with you.”

  Masters maneuvered the Humvee through a set of low office buildings and turned toward a nest of houses that could have been designed by an unimaginative child—a door with a window on either side, and a simple gable roof over the top. The color scheme was uniformly gray. The Ritz-Carlton it wasn’t.

  “That’s the on-base accommodation I couldn’t get you
into,” she said.

  “My luck’s improving, then,” I replied.

  We reached an intersection and Masters turned left, into a large parking lot. “We have to change vehicles,” she said.

  That made sense. Being so wide, the Humvee was not road-friendly, especially if the road narrowed and meandered through a town.

  Masters pulled up beside a purple midsized Mercedes-Benz. “That’s mine,” she said, with a vague hint of pride, gesturing at the vehicle. “You can pick a Mercedes up here for a song.”

  We got out of the Humvee and into the Merc. It was a nice car inside—smelled of leather and wood. “It looks new,” I said.

  “Actually, it’s fifteen years old,” she replied. “It was a promotional car for a local printer. The color made it hard to sell. I got it cheap.”

  I can do small talk with the best of them, but, for molar reasons, my heart wasn’t in it. “Before we go much further, do I have time to see a dentist?”

  “No,” said Masters without missing a beat, pulling out of the parking lot and joining the queue exiting the base via the security gate. “Why?”

  “Toothache.”

  “Aside from the fact that we’ve got to get you cleaned up before you meet with the general, it’s oh-seven-thirty. Dentistry’s a nine-to-five gig. I’ve got some Tylenols in the glove compartment if you need them.”

  “No, thanks,” I said. Given the number I’d eaten over the past twenty-four hours, I was vaguely concerned about my liver. I folded my arms and buried my tongue in the hole. The cold was finding its way through my cheek and into the root. The pain was making me short-tempered, and I’m usually such a lovely, placid soul.

  “I’ve got you a room in K-town. It’s small, but it’s clean.”

  “K-town?”

  “Kaiserslautern. Everyone calls it K-town. Back in ’55, it was the biggest community of U.S. citizens outside of America. At the moment, there are around forty-five thousand of us living there. We’ve got American football, American hot dogs, American cinemas, American shopping malls—”

  “America,” I said. “Don’t leave home without it.”

  Masters responded with cool silence.

  My new, temporary partner was young and possessed a perfect set of teeth. Her bio, thoughtfully included in my briefing notes, said she was twenty-six and held the rank of major. Twenty-six was too young to be a major. Masters was either very good at her job, or very good on the job. She came across as efficient, officious, and no doubt had several volumes of air force articles surgically inserted up her ass for round-the-clock reference.

  I turned my attention to the world zipping by. The countryside was flat and rural, a bit like the area around Brandywine, only the German landscape was neater, more orderly, almost manicured. The small, immaculate farms were separated by stands of towering pines. Intermittent showers sprinkled from fluffy, toylike clouds pasted against a pale blue watercolor sky, and I counted one, two, three, four rainbows this time. The street signs we passed bore long, unpronounceable names for towns and cities up ahead, and any moment I expected to see a gingerbread house and maybe a witch chasing two kids around it on her broom. But then I saw a sign with the familiar golden butt that told me I was only four kilometers away from the world’s favorite hamburger, and I felt less like I’d been hijacked by a Grimm’s fairy tale.

  K-town—Kaiserslautern—seemed to appear out of nowhere. The outskirts of the town were devoid of the usual three-mile strip of auto-body repairers and retailers and fast-food restaurants selling more or less the same stack of pancakes. This was America done the way the U.S. military likes it, probably not that far from how Germany likes it: anal.

  We drove through the town, past American-style malls. There were joggers everywhere wearing Nike, Russell Athletic, and Everlast. All the street signs were in English. The only clue that I wasn’t in some U.S. town, maybe somewhere north on the east coast, were all the Mercedes running around—even Mercedes cabs. K-town was bigger than I expected, not that I had spent much time speculating on its dimensions.

  We skirted the city center, which had the usual collection of midsized glass office towers, and drove through an area populated by huge U.S.-military warehouses. I tried to think about where to get this investigation started but couldn’t. Eventually, Masters slowed. We turned into a tree-lined street and began looking for a place to park. “This is it,” she said, pulling against the curb.

  I got out and grabbed my bag from the backseat. Masters crossed the road and walked up to a sign that said, Pensione Freedom. U.S. Servicemen Serviced with a Smile. I wondered how many U.S. servicemen had been amused by the quaint, unintentional turn of phrase. I followed the major and took the flight of four stairs up into the foyer. The place smelled of disinfectant and sausage, a not entirely unpleasant combination. A tall square-shaped frau with blond hair turning to gray at the roots came through a door behind the counter. Her shoulders were broad and barely cleared the doorjamb. She was not particularly pleased to see us, or even displeased. Indifferent, I’d say, nailed her attitude. If she were ever asked to describe me, I don’t think she’d be able to. That suited me fine. If I were anonymous, I could come and go as I pleased, unobserved, no questions asked.

  “Morgen,” said Masters. “There should be a booking under the name of Cooper.”

  The frau consulted her PC screen and said, “Ja.” She slid a card across the counter with all my details already filled in. “Sign, bitte,” she said. I did as asked and received a key in return, along with half a dozen of the pensione’s business cards.

  “No smoking in zer rooms. Vee haff detectors. Room zree-oh-zree, level zree, turn right,” the frau said with sausage breath, nodding at the narrow fifties-style elevator opposite the counter.

  “I’m going to get a cup of coffee down the road,” said Masters. “Oh, before I forget, you’ll need these.” She handed me a large envelope. “Your common access card—your CAC—will get you in and out of Ramstein. You’ll find a cell phone and pager in there, too, as well as a swipe card to get you into OSI on the base. See you in, say, twenty.”

  She turned and walked out before I could offer an alternate plan. The receptionist had slipped away too, gone back to her bratwurst. I was alone in the foyer with a bag that contained four pairs of underwear and socks, a spare shirt, and a toothbrush I was too afraid to use. To be honest, I don’t like being told what to do, which might be an odd thing for someone in the military to say. But I especially don’t like it when I’m being ordered around by an officer of the same rank. So I walked out.

  Okay, I needed a shower, but what I needed more than anything else was that dentist, or at least some serious painkillers. Deodorant would’ve been good, too, and some mouthwash. I was thinking that maybe I could rinse my teeth clean. I also needed a car. It occurred to me that General Scott’s second-in-command wasn’t the person I should interview first. That honor went to the chief crash investigator. And I also wanted to talk to the person everyone seemed most concerned about, not, it seemed, because her husband had been killed, but because of who her father was.

  I found a tourist office and took a map of K-town. I asked the woman behind the counter for the nearest tooth doctor and was told that he didn’t open till 0900, confirming what Masters had said. That was still half an hour away. I found a pharmacy and bought the strongest analgesic available without a prescription.

  Next stop, Hertz. I rented a Mercedes—what else?—and a map of the Rhineland-Palatinate, the province I found myself in. By the time I got back behind the wheel, the painkillers were working—mercifully—and I found myself able to at last concentrate on the job.

  I drove back down the highway, retracing my steps to Ramstein, fumbling with Masters’s report, holding it against the steering wheel as I read. Two miles beyond the Kaiserslautern city limit, the pager beeped. WHERE ARE YOU? it said. I turned it off. A handful of seconds later, the cell began ringing. I was about to turn that off, too, but decided to see what wa
s up.

  “Major, what are you doing?” said the voice on the other end.

  “Driving. Do they do it on the left side of the road here, or the right?”

  “What?”

  “I’m on the road to Ramstein, which I know sounds like a song title or an old Bob Hope movie, but—”

  “Special Agent Cooper, we agreed that you were going to meet me in the foyer.”

  “No, you agreed on that, but I’m not sure who with. Hey, I hired a Mercedes, like yours only newer. I think I prefer Chevrolet.” I can be infuriating, especially when I want to be, and this was one of those times. It was obvious that Masters didn’t want me here, probably because she thought she was more than capable. She was treating me like I was a pain in the ass, and I objected to that because she didn’t even know me. And, apart from these interpersonal observations, as far as I could see from her report, her investigation had gotten precisely nowhere. It was all typed out neat and tidy and all her verbs were conjugated correctly, but the whole was utterly devoid of any imagination or intuition. She didn’t get it. Scott had been killed, but the big question on everyone’s lips was whether someone had helped him along, even though no one was prepared to even voice that option, except for Gruyere, and her only admission on that point was the fact that she’d sent me here. Masters had asked questions and people had answered them, but she didn’t appear to have questioned the answers.

  “You’ve got a meeting with Lieutenant General von Koeppen in fifteen minutes,” Masters said.

  “But I haven’t had a shower or a shave and I’m still wearing yesterday’s nonthermal underwear.”

  Silence.

  I wondered whether she was the type who uses silence as a weapon to keep her partner in line. Not my kind of woman. “Okay, then,” I said, keeping it light and cheery. “I’ll catch up with you later.” I didn’t wait for an answer. I ended the call and turned off the cell. That was against the rules, of course. In this business, people get nervous if they can’t contact you 24/7. I opened the glove compartment and threw the phone in, closing the hatch after it.